


When the Bough Breaks

by twoandfour



Category: British Actor RPF
Genre: Autopsies, Crime Scenes, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Infant Death, Slow Build, descriptions of dead bodies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-16
Updated: 2015-05-16
Packaged: 2018-03-30 18:07:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3946519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twoandfour/pseuds/twoandfour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amelia Hutchins is small-town detective in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. Tom Hiddleston is her secretive but charming new partner. Their first case together may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Amelia’s past… or it may swallow them both in an evil darker than the hills themselves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Bough Breaks

Amy absently thumbed crumbs from her lip and glanced down at the remains of her roast beef on rye. She sighed, trying to recall the last time she’d had anything for one of her customary working lunches besides one of Tammy’s roast-beef-on-ryes from Earl’s Sunnyside Grill across from the station.

Maybe Lenny had been right. A change or two might do her good. Hell, a different sandwich, at least. Ham. Turkey. One of those new wraps with grilled chicken that Tammy had managed to convince Earl would be popular with the more health-conscious citizens of Henner’s Creek. Not that there were any.

She shook her head and swiped some mustard from the wax paper, then sucked it off of her finger. Screw it. Lenny was an asshole and she’d checked him out of her life almost six months ago. Hell if she was going to start taking his advice now. Besides, the other changes he’d so kindly advised had involved both significant weight loss and alternative uses for her department-issued handcuffs.

Her thoughts drifted to the ever-present dilemma of “never date another local boy” and “what if that means I never get laid again”, but before she could go any further down that dim road, her chief strode in and plopped himself down in the vinyl chair across from her desk.

She smiled. “What’s up, Bob?”

“Aw, you know. Usual. Mobsters, drug-runnin’, international incidents..”

“Did you bust Billy Watkins and his skater friends with a pack of Marlboros again?”

He gave her a doleful glance. “Don’t rub it in, Ames.”

She laughed. “Oh, boss… I know Henner’s Creek isn’t New York. Hell, it’s not even Asheville.”

He snorted.

“But you do us well, old man.”

“Thanks, Ames.” He smiled broadly, the yellow overhead light winking off of his bald pate through the scraggly lines of brown hair he still managed to comb over it.

“What can I do you for, boss?”

Bob straightened a fraction and scratched at his neck.

“Oh. Oh, no.”

“Sorry, Amy, but you know we’ve gotta-”

“What is this, the fourth time this year?”

“Something like that,” he said, nodding placatingly, “but you know we’ve gotta respond-”

“Why? Why do we ‘gotta’ respond, Bob? Ben Wheatley thinks his little farm is littered with mass graves and the most interesting thing we’ve ever found turned out to be the skunk he’d shot two weeks before.” Amy sunk down in her chair and put her hand to her forehead.

Bob nodded and pressed his lips together. “Yeah, Ames, I know. I know. But we’re law enforcement and you’re a detective and if somebody thinks they’ve got human remains on their property, it’s your job to go and make sure that’s what it ain’t.”

She sighed.

“Besides, tell me what you’ve got goin’ otoday that’s more exciting.” He winked.

Amy threw up her hands and stood, balling up the wax paper from her sandwich and tossing it in the plastic tub in the corner. “Fine. Fine, I’ll go. But if it turns out to be another skunk, you’re buying me lunch tomorrow.”

“Tammy’s roast beef on rye, right?”

She glared at him and he grinned, then turned to leave.

As she was gathering up her badge, gun, keys, and phone, he turned back.

“By the way, Ames,” he said, scratching at his neck again.

“Yeah?” She finished holstering her firearm and pocketed her phone and keys.

“Your, uh. Your new partner’s coming in this afternoon.”

She stilled.

“Should be here in a jif, if you wanna wait-”

She swallowed and pinched the bridge of her nose, screwing her eyes shut tight. She felt her boss wind his way around to the back of her desk and lay a hand on her shoulder.

“Amy.” She stayed perfectly still, counting down from ten in her head. “Amelia. Look at me, hon.”

Shakily, she took a deep breath and stepped back, forcing herself to look up into Bob’s kind brown eyes.

He dropped his hand and studied her. Finally, he said, “I know it’s been a rough go-”

“Terry killed himself, Bob. He was my partner, my friend, and he killed himself. It’s too soon. I can’t-”

“You have to.”

She looked down at her grey flats. Bob followed her line of sight, then looked back up at her.

He cleared his throat and exhaled through his nose. “And that was hard on all of us, and especially you, I know. But the thing is, honey, you can’t be without a partner. Gotta have one. It’s the rules. If it’s any consolation, I’ve been told by quite a few folks that he’s a good man and a good detective. It’ll do you well to have the support.”

Amy blinked, then nodded. “Alright. Yeah, okay. So. When is he coming in?”

Bob clapped her on the shoulder and she smiled to spite herself. “‘At’s my girl. Last I heard, he was gettin’ settled in at the Inn and should be by fairly soon. If you’re still up at Wheatley’s, I’ll send him by.”

She sniffed. “Somehow I doubt I’ll be up at Wheatley’s longer than it takes to identify a rotten possum and have a glass of his nasty-ass lemonade.”

“All lemon, no ade, right?”

She smiled.

“Right.”

Amy parked the light blue Taurus in Ben Wheatley’s littered front yard and got out. Winding her way past sun-bleached bottles of motor oil and rusted junkers whose concrete block pillars had sunk halfway into the long grass, she approached the peeling front door and knocked.

The battered wooden porch creaked underneath her as she waited, and she returned the lazy nod of Coop, the ancient Basset hound, who was lounging on the other end next to an equally ancient lawnmower.

Finally, the door creaked open, and old Benjamin Wheatley’s leathered face and wild blue eyes appeared.

“Miss Amelia, a pleasure, always a pleasure, what a sight you are for old eyes!”

She smiled and graciously allowed him to pump her hand and goggle at her. He might have a few cobwebs in the attic, she thought, but he was harmless and sweet.

After an awkward minute or two, she gently pulled her hand away.

“What have you got for me today, Ben?”

He smiled widely, showing off his few remaining tobacco-stained teeth. Seeming to suddenly remember himself, he stepped back and ushered her over the threshold with a grand sweep of one bony hand.

She stepped inside and stifled the usual urge to retch. Ben’s wife Grace had passed two years prior, and the time had not been kind to him. Or to the house.

In the dim light shining through the cracks in the walls, she could make out months-forgotten sandwiches and bowls of canned soup abandoned on every surface; stacks of newspapers and copies of Guns ‘N Ammo littered every available seat, save one threadbare end of the sofa, situated directly in front of the old cathode ray tube TV.

Only Grace’s treasured upright piano gleamed bright and uncluttered from the far corner of the room, the few knick-knacks atop it shining like new pennies, the yellowing hymnal turned to Bringing In the Sheaves still perched midway-through on the music desk.

Ben had shuffled off to the kitchen and come back bearing a grimy glass of something that he pressed into her hands. She accepted it and took a sip, gallantly refusing to grimace as the taste of warm, undiluted lemon juice crossed her tongue.

“Thank you, Ben.”

“You sure are welcome, Miss Amelia,” Ben smiled.

“So. Um.” She cleared her throat.

He came back to himself once more. “Right! Yeah! Right! I called you on up here!”

“You did!” she smiled. “What’s up?”

He grinned his toothy grin at her again and bobbed his head. “I think I really got somethin’ for you this time, Miss Amelia! You better follow me, I’ll show it to ya. No skunk or coon or possum this time, Miss Amelia, no ma’am. I’ll show ya. Coop smelt it and set up such a holler as you ain’t never heard before, Miss, such a holler! Best nose in the county, Miss Amelia! What we got here is a genuine dead body, I feel it in my bones!”

“Okay, Ben, you wanna show me where?” she said, deciding not to bring up the fact that Coop’s nose had been solidly defunct for at least five years and everyone in town knew it.

“Yes ma’am, you just follow me on up, Miss Amelia, I show ya.”

They cleared the inadvertent maze of the back yard, Amy trailing a few yards behind Ben, then climbed up the small but steep hill leading into the pine forest behind the house. Given how many times she’d been out there in the last few years, Amy thought she could probably navigate those woods back to town with her eyes closed.

About one hundred twenty yards in (she measured by her stride), Ben stopped. She stepped up beside him. He pointed to a spot half-hidden by undergrowth next to a tall pine.

“There, Miss Amelia, right there. See where Coop done dug a little? Got him away soon as he started bayin’ and a-diggin’, knew you’d wanna come see for yourself. Didn’t wanna…” He thought about it for a long second. “Didn’t wanna disturb the crime scene,” he finished, puffing out his bony chest.

“Well, thank you, Ben, that’s a kindness. Makes my job easier, you know. Well. Let’s see what we’ve got!”

He grinned.

Amy reached into her pocket and drew out a pair of latex gloves. Approaching the spot Ben had pointed out, she snapped them on, then crouched down and swept back the creeping foliage, exposing the disturbed earth underneath. Her other hand brushed gently at the soil Coop had bothered. No sense in doing a half-assed job, just in case, she thought.

At first, her probing of the soil yielded nothing. She shifted her weight slightly and pushed into the earth a little deeper. Okay, there we go, she thought, as her palm detected something hard and smooth.

She dropped onto her knees and crouched closer to visually inspect what she’d felt. A bone. It was yellowed but still contrasted sharply against the deep red-brown of the soil. She followed the curve of it upward as she brushed more of the earth away, a pit of something she couldn’t identify settling in her stomach.

Now there was something rounder and more substantial pushing up at her hand from the dirt. She took a shallow breath and released the foliage so she could use both hands to gingerly unearth it. Her right thumb felt the hard ridge of a jaw and she scraped the rest of the dirt away.

She scrambled backwards onto her hands.

“Oh. God,” she breathed.

A skull. A human skull. But a tiny, tiny one. The exposed half of it stared up at her in the dappled sunlight. She allowed her eyes to sweep over the whole of what she’d uncovered, and she swallowed back the bile that stung her throat.

An infant. No more than a few weeks or even days old when it was buried here, her brain told her through the haze. A baby. Dead. Abandoned in the woods behind Old Man Wheatley’s house. She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, then tore her fingers from her face, remembering what they’d just uncovered.

She hadn’t heard the other vehicle coming up the gravel drive, or the sounds of the doors slamming, or the other footsteps picking their way over roots and plants and pinecones.

It wasn’t until a hand- too large and too consciously gentle to be Bob’s- came to rest on her back, that she rallied herself and looked up. And into a pair of brilliant blue eyes.

The world snapped back into focus as she stared. The rushing was gone from her ears and she could hear Bob on his radio and Coop snuffling and Ben rocking back and forth on the pine needles praying “Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord.”

The blue eyes continued to stare back at her. Not blankly. There was concern, but not panic. The hand at her back was supportive but not overwhelming. She inhaled deeply and straightened up.

“I’m okay,” she said.

“Good. I’m Tom. Hiddleston.”

The voice was smooth and calming. And English. She stared.

His eyebrows lifted, then crinkled in the middle. He shifted down to his knees. “Um. I’m your new partner. I thought… Chief Griffin told me you knew I’d be arriving today?”

Amy stared a second longer then shook her head. “Yeah- yes. He did. I just. You’re… English.”

Tom nodded. “Yes.”

Amy cocked her head. 

 

“… Why?”

Tom raised an eyebrow. “… Because I’m from England,” he replied.

Amy gaped at him.

He smiled softly and stood, offering his hand to her. She hesitated, then accepted, and allowed him to help her stand.

“I think,” she said, “this is a conversation best had later.”

He nodded. “Of course,” he said, inclining his head and appraising her.

“This is… really awful. And I take it you don’t get things like this often.”

“No. We don’t,” she replied. Then she caught on and a flare of professional pride lit her words. “Listen, we may be small-town,” she said, swelling. “But I am absolutely qualified to handle this.”

“Then it’s your call,” he said, somberly and steadily. He motioned to the tiny grave. “Tell me what you need from me.”


End file.
